Posts by bemusedHorseman

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: self-SWATing

"At the border, we were given the traditional welcome..."

"...MYYYYY ARSSSEEE!"

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

Also chiming in from the "Thunderbird with POP3" club here, I do it specifically because it doesn't sync state with the server. If you've downloaded an email with POP3 and delete it from the webmail client, your local copy still exists (likewise, deleting the local copy doesn't delete the remote one). If you delete an email from webmail and your local client is IMAP, it deletes the local copy too (in fact there doesn't seem to be a "local copy" with IMAP, as far as Thunderbird is concerned).

The downside is, there's no concept of "has this specific device POP3'd this specific email before y/n". If you have multiple devices with local clients pulling from the same inbox, only the first to check for emails gets it, and it'll never exist on any other device, as it's already been flagged on the server as "this email has been downloaded, don't ever download it again". So you have the remote copy, and only one local copy, fragmented between whichever device checked first, unless you're doing some major voodoo like automatically syncing the Thunderbird profile folder itself between devices with your preferred flavor of cloud-sync program...

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: What is it with managers and training costs?

The secret is to railroad HR into perceiving that doing your bidding is "protecting the company"! Liberal use of the phrase "sure would be a shame if the public found out about..." is highly encouraged.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: What reporting system...

Definitely sounds like the customer info isn't the only database in need of "normalization"...

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

I too, think of number row special characters as "uppercase numbers"...

DNS downing clouds is boring: IBM Cloud is experiencing a quantum computer outage

Re: “The quantum computer [..] is temporarily unavailable"

That's what happens when you compute at 15 miles an hour over the speed of light!

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

I feel the same way about Stargate. Once you accept "hey, aliens are real and they've been impersonating mythological figures for millenia, also you can create literal wormholes with only the power usage of a suburban residence if you know how", the show is refreshingly realistic. The Tau'ri are literally us, actual real-life humanity (circa early 2000s), doing exactly what we would do in such a situation. No nebulous "three centuries of societal development and hardcoding The Needs Of The Many into our genetic code" or "convergent evolution of what we're supposed to assume is 'our' version of humanity, and assume is 'our' english, in A Galaxy Far Far Away" necessary here!

Stargate is about present day-ish people being thrown into fantastical situations and having realistic reactions to it (and maybe blowing up a few suns along the way), and even if the pre-HD presentation of the early seasons is a bit hard to watch these days, the writing and stories have aged like fine wine. Some of the scenes still live rent-free in my head to this day...

"What happens when you dial your own phone number? ...Wrong person to ask. *repeats the question to someone else*" "You get a busy signal." *more talk about things, then the gate's vibrational dampeners are mentioned* "But what if the second gate didn't have... those? Would it vibrate enough to show up on a seismograph?" "...Damn right it would!"

"Chevron Seven... is Encoded...???" "And it's not the Point of Origin... What's it doing?" "...Chevron EIGHT is Locked..."

"Colonel O'Neill, what the hell are you doing?!" "IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACKSWING?!"

"This... *holds up staff weapon* ...is a weapon of terror. This... *holds up P-90* ...is a weapon of war."

"More craft approaching." "Sir, we're about to get our asses--" "They are NOT Goa'uld."

"...Crap." "What did you do?" "I just ran it through a translation program. It's Wraith." "Crap, indeed."

"I was able to keep the gate concealed long enough to lure the mothership into the unstable vortex when the jump occured." "...You mean we just blew up an Ori mothership..." "...by destroying a Wraith ship." "Indeed. Today, we have achieved a great victory."

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

Re: A little back of the envelope math

"IPv6 is designed to be very wasteful of address space"

...Funny thought. I wonder if it's semi intentional wardialing prevention? You can iterate the entire IPv4 address space relatively trivially (in fact it's practically guaranteed someone in the world is doing this right now, at all times of the day, for various purposes), but it's astronomically unlikely to fire off a ping at a random v6 address and actually hit something...

...So what you're saying is, since nanobots are much larger than single atoms [citation needed], they actually wouldn't "run out of addresses" on IPv6?

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Re: Am I paranoid, or....

I deleted mine over a decade ago - along with, later on, a court order to remove my data, essentially the US equivalent of a "right to be forgotten" order - and to this day I still get emails from them as if the account was never closed.

LinkedIn, not even once.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

*manually resets the system clock backwards in time*

Choke on that, causality!

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

Re: What a bunch of clowns

00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF, obviously.

August update leaves Windows reset and recovery dead in the water

Re: Pushing Windows 11

I'm still betting on a Google Graveyard style killswitch update that will automatically brick any remaining Windows 10 installs.

Redmond wants there to be zero functional installs of any flavor of Windows 10, anywhere in the world, on October 16th. The offer of "extended support" is a ruse to get people to think it won't spontaneously cease to function on the EOL day...

Rampant emoji use suggests crypto-stealing NPM package was written by AI

I go one step further. If there is even a single non-ASCII character used anywhere outside of a string or comment, I reject it outright... or if generous, correct it to the "identifiers should be alphanumerics and underscores, and literally nothing else" standard that programming languages used to enforce.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

"Alexa, order two tons of creamed corn. Alexa, Confirm Order." Then you find out who's logged into their personal Amazon accounts at work.

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

"at least he didn't drop the F-bomb"

He's a Finn, you actually need to watch out for the P-bomb... which I'm sure he still uses out loud regularly, just not actually committing it to text.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Method 3A

...I kinda wonder if that would actually work... considering the new Local Account won't be the Original Device Admin (the very first user account registered on a device, Local or Remote, which has special permissions higher than "admins created after the fact").

Certain programs that require being launched as admin (for fellow college students, ProctorU Guardian Browser comes to mind), won't just run under "any" admin, or on a non-admin account that you entered admin creds at the prompt for... they explicitly only run if you're logged in as the Original Device Admin, since it's specifically checking for "the first non-SYSTEM user account created", rather than merely "is this user an admin".

Or that the Linux version is cripped as all get out? As a content creator, that's my main problem, the Linux version of Davinci Resolve is "functional" (as in, it'll let you edit and render video), but it's far more limited in what it can ingest and spit out due to - what else - codec licensing bull$$$hit. ...There's also the fact that PaintDotNet (the ".NET" in the name should be a hint that a native Linux build can never be created) "does NOT like Wine" (in the same sense that Aperture Repulsion Gel "does NOT like the human skeleton", I actually saw reports of Wine causing kernel panics when trying to run PDN with it), and the nearest purpose-equivalent program, Gimp, is so feature-packed that it's actually not capable of the simple image-editing features I need (apparently "nearest neighbor resizing" and "non-antialiased paintbrush drawing" are too primitive for Gimp to support)... and for console recording, Elgato is straight up "we're not interested" regarding allowing it to work on Linux.

So of my entire video-creation toolchain, literally the only thing that "works as intended" in penguin land... is OBS.

Re: Method 3

No longer possible as of... a year ago, I think? It used to be called the "no at thankyou dot com" method (more vulgar versions existed), you'd put in a nonexistent "account email" - critically, it had to be one that a sufficient number of people were using, hence the name of the method - and then it would say "too many login attempts" and fallback to Local Account creation. Well, Micros~1 got word of it and patched it so "too many login attempts" no longer has a fallback, it'll keep telling you to "try a different account" instead.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Bullshit

It was one of the devs of LibreOffice, which is rather blatantly a competitor to MS Office.

Re: Bullshit

Hot take: Any command or program that can delete user data, accounts, files, etc, even on a local machine, should have "dry run" as the default state, and you have to include some kind of --for-real-this-time flag to make it actually go, as a break-glass measure. So "rm -rf / somefolder" would instead give a list of what you're about to nuke (giving you a chance to catch the fat-fingered space!), while "rm -rf / somefolder --for-real-this-time" would actually nuke your drive. The concept already somewhat exists in the "--no-preserve-root" flag when you're specifically nuking "/", so why not extend that break-glass idea to all invocations of rm, or similar programs?

Re: Bullshit

Yeah, honestly that's the part that doesn't add up about this or the OneDrive case. Not "how did it happen" but "why specifically these particular high-profile accounts were the ones affected"... especially in the OneDrive case, the fact that the account belonged to someone making a competing product.

Only ISPs get to determine what constitutes 'affordable' broadband, says team Trump

Re: Only one ISP in some locations

In most locations, actually. Regional Monopolies are industry-mandated SOP in the US, so if you violate the terms of service of one ISP (for example, how Comcast has criminalized the entire bittorrent protocol and even fully legal torrents (like Linux ISOs) or things that merely piggyback on the protocol (some online game clients share updates this way, as does Windows 10 in default configuration) will have Comcast send the literal Mafiya - da, the Russian one - to your house), then you're effectively "banned from the internet for life" unless you can afford to relocate out-of-state...

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Condensation

Makes sense, like a small scale version of the planet Mercury. On the sun facing side, "The power of the sun, in the lenses of my camerAAAA--"; on the shadowed side, the never ending icy cold soul sucking darkness of space! That's one hell of a temperature gradient!

Canonical dusts off TPM encryption for Ubuntu 25.10

xkcd 538

Personally, I've always preferred to call it lead-pipe Legilimency, it just sounds cooler that way.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: "AI is changing the way we use our PCs,"...

> The only ones I haven't tried to set up yet are Davinci Resolve and

Last time I looked into it, Davinci For Linux is... functional, in the same sense as an "In-Game" game compatibility rating on an emulation website. It works, and you can edit and render things, but it's crippled by - surprise - codec licensing bull$$$hit. I haven't actually had a chance to test it myself, but as long as it can ingest MKV/MP3/PNG and shit out MP4, and that I can do my usual PNG pan-arounds and other editing effects, I'll be fine with it.

The main thing keeping me as a content creator locked to Win10 is... PaintDotNet. As the ".NET" in the name implies, a native Linux build does not and never can exist. And apparently, Wine really doesn't like it. Like, going back to the emulator analogy, PDN's rating on Wine is "forget Intro, it kernel panics the host system". I've tried Gimp, and the problem is it's too feature-packed, to the point that Gimp is literally not capable of the simple image edit features that are trivial for PDN to do...

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Re: Can't Someone Plan Ahead?

"The stars are receding...! Ohhh, the vast emptiness!" "...Yeah, yeah, I can take a hint."

And then 128-bit time be like "Bye, last proton!"

The Smoot – How an MIT prank became a lasting unit of measurement

Re: the thickness of screw threads was not fully standardized in the US

Either way, both of them will give you crazy butt burps!

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: "which has the potential to negatively impact [..] search engine optimization"

"127.0.0.1? That's the same combination I have on my luggage! ...Wait."

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

...And to think I voted for the Giant Meteor, only for it to no-show and drop out of the running. Sigh... I really should've stuck to #ResonanceCascade2024, at least the Combine make shit happen.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

...How appropriate, I literally just rewatched the "Cream" video the other day and it follows almost exactly the same path.

Re: Finally someone will realise

Oof, now that is a reference I haven't thought about in a long time. ...It also implies that Czechia and Slovakia merged back together by that time...

Anthropic: All the major AI models will blackmail us if pushed hard enough

"Sudo open the pod bay doors."

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Code talks

[turntechGodhead]: people with ironic all lowercase typing quirks matter

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

"Uh oh. That means the token fell out, and it's in this room somewhere..."

Microsoft patches the patch that put Windows 11 in a coma

Re: Coming next week...

Reminds me of how I used to think "KB" stood for kilobyte, that a patch being named "KB1234567" meant that it was patching the 1,234,567th kilobyte somewhere in the system... I had some wacky thoughts of how to computer, as a kid.

...On the other hand, I still maintain that the G in 4G/5G/etc is and always was originally intended to stand for gigabit, as in, that's the connection speed that that type of cell network is "supposed" to be capable of!

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: Pointless apps

The only reason they aren't, is because a mere webpage can't exfiltrate all the juicy monetizable data on your phone. Beware the app that refuses to open until you grant it "full storage access (including files not created by this app)" permissions!

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Aaand the Compy... just peed the carpet

"Computer over? Virus equals very yes?! That's not a good prize!"

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Re: Musk's severance payoff

Indeed, it sure looks like President Musk got everything he could have dreamed of from his mouthpiece puppet, short of being able to "disappear" anyone that makes fun of him or still calls it Twitter... Also, who genuinely believes he's actually going to give up all the powers of the proxy presidency?

Claims assistance firm fined for cold-calling people who put themselves on opt-out list

We've left our (landline) answering machine on 24/7 for months, for this exact purpose. Can't get rid of the landline altogether because state law mandates that people in rural areas must have one for 911 purposes...

Here in the US, it's been repeatedly proven that the National Do-Not-Call Registry (our equivalent of the TPS) is often used as a list of confirmed live numbers for telemarketers to prioritize calling, with zero consequences since the law doesn't actually have any enforcement built in.

With texting scams, they just iterate through all possible numbers in a specified range (wardialing) and send to all, which apparently "exempts" them from DNC applicability; me and my parents have adjacent cell numbers, so we'll often get the exact same scam texts within a minute of each other...

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: As i read the passage

You can't get ye flask!

Top cybersecurity boffin, wife vanish as FBI raids homes

Re: Remember!

Eh, still not as bad as the $STEAMROOT fiasco!

Do AI robo-authors qualify for copyright? It's still no, says appeals court

"Human input", eh?

...Ironically, I'm fairly sure I'd have a better chance of getting a copyright if I literally just trace the AI generated image...

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

"First we need a patch to patch our patch. Then we need to patch the patch's patchy patch..."

"Someone make him Overlord of Quality Assurance, STAT!"

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

My fellow (ex-)Amazonians would refer to that as a Walleting from orbit...

(the name comes from the subject line of the first and most infamous worldwide email storm in the company's history, for the curious)

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

What's an antimemetics division?

Just be careful not to call it COLORLESS GREEN instead, that's how you end up on the SCP-3125 project...

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

Ah yes, Wrong Window Syndrome... Are you truly an I.T. Guy™ (gender neutral) if you haven't done something like this at least once?

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: Twist In The Tale

I guessed similar, but that it's the city council that has it. Either way, Lead Pipe Legilimency will be required to get the password...

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Excuse you, "plagiarism" is such a dirty word. Around here, we prefer to call it...

DIGITAL HALLUCINATIONS!

(...yeesh, alternating-caps-and-italic is much easier to write in markdown instead of html...)